73 m. ago Twitter: Breaking the Bird review – how all the hate speech flooded in

This film shows how a ‘hallucinogenically optimistic’ vision descended into the hellscape we know today. Young, confident men really should not rule the internet It turns out that Mike Judge’s supposed sitcom Silicon Valley was a documentary after all. My bad, as the people young and in touch enough with the world to have known this all along may still say.Twitter: Breaking the Bird is a 75-minute CNN film chronicling the rise, fall and possibly end of the social media site that was launched by a group of eager young things in 2006 amid a widespread belief – at least in the Valley – in the power of the internet to remake the world in radically better ways. This, a co-founder or two has come to consider since, may have been a “hallucinogenically optimistic” view. Well, we were all young once. Although that feels – and in no small measure because of Twitter – like a very long time ago. Continue reading...

Events

6 h. ago Artificial intelligence firms should pay artists and musicians for using their work amid uproar over Labour's plans to exempt them from copyright laws, according to a new poll of Brits

New research shows 69 per cent of the public and 86 per cent of politicians think Silicon Valley giants should compensate creators when they use their work to train AI models.

Economics

57 h. ago Move fast, kill things: the tech startups trying to reinvent defence with Silicon Valley values

Venture capital-backed, $1bn companies are disrupting the way war will be waged with AI and futuristic weapons. Will they overthrow the traditional big military manufacturers, and what would that mean for the battlefield?Visit tech startup Skydio’s headquarters on the San Francisco peninsula in California and you’re likely to find flying robots buzzing on the roof overhead. Docking stations with motorised covers open to allow small drones that resemble the TIE fighters from Star Wars films to take off; when each drone lands back again, they close. The drones can fly completely autonomously and without GPS, taking in data from onboard cameras and using AI to execute programmed missions and avoid obstacles.Skydio, with more than $740m in venture capital funding and a valuation of about $2.5bn, makes drones for the military along with civilian organisations such as police forces and utility companies. The company moved away from the consumer market in 2020 and is now the largest US dro...

Events

6 d. ago Napster, now a streaming service, sells for $207m to Infinite Reality

Tech startup says it bought company once linked to music piracy to transform it into a social music platform for artistsA brand that was notoriously connected to music piracy before re-emerging as a subscription music service, has been sold to Infinite Reality for $207m.The tech startup announced on Tuesday it had bought Napster in hopes of transforming the streaming service into a social music platform where artists can connect with fans and better monetize off their work. Continue reading...

Politics

6 d. ago Teenagers worshiping in London and Christians in Silicon Valley

Teenagers worshiping in London and Christians in Silicon Valley  Denison Forum

Politics

9 d. ago Reid Hoffman: ‘Start using AI deeply. It is a huge intelligence amplifier’

The co-founder of LinkedIn and Democrat donor remains confident that AI can be good for all of us – if its introduction is handled in the right wayReid Hoffman is a prominent Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding the professional social networking site LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. He’s also staunchly anti-Trump. The longtime Democrat donor threw his support behind Kamala Harris in the race for the White House. Hoffman spoke to the Observer about technology in the new political milieu and his new book about our future with artificial intelligence, Superagency. The book, while not ignoring the problems that AI might cause, argues that the technology is poised to give us cognitive superpowers that will increase our individual and collective human agency, creating a state of widespread empowerment for society.You have a vested interest in being positive about AI, including a company focused on conversational AI for business, Inflection AI. Why s...

Politics

9 d. ago The future happens in Oakland first. That’s a cautionary tale for global cities

International trade boomed with the city’s early adoption of technological and economic changes, but Black neighborhoods became ‘sacrifice zones’Oakland, California, is often treated as a city on the margins, best known for its struggles with poverty and gun violence, as well as for its history of radical Black activism. But a new book, The Pacific Circuit, argues that Oakland should be viewed as one of the centers of global change in the past century, serving both as a key node in the new global economy built around trans-Pacific trade, and as one of the “sacrifice zones” this economy requires.Far from being an outlier, US journalist Alexis Madrigal argues, Oakland is in fact an early adopter of the technological and economic changes now tearing through cities across the US, and around the world. Oakland has long been the canary in Silicon Valley’s coalmine of disruption, the book suggests. But its residents don’t suffer passively: they organize and learn how to fight back. Continu...

Politics

1 week ago Inside South by Southwest, where tech bros and hippies battle for the soul of Austin

Austin, Texas is caught between two identities: the offbeat home of live music and the new rival to Silicon Valley. How did that tension play out South by Southwest, the yearly festival which blends the two?

Events

1 week ago Hollywood stars call on Donald Trump to make AI pay for their work amid tech row

Cate Blanchett, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Bette Midler are among 400 actors, film-makers, writers and musicians urging his administration to resist lobbying by Silicon Valley.

Politics

2 w. ago E2E 100 Female: Susan Bowen on leading Digital Catapult’s mission for tech growth

The CEO shares how the organisation is accelerating deep tech adoption, bridging industry gaps, and driving UK business innovation

Events

2 w. ago Virtual reality goggles helped me on the path to physical recovery

An unexpected bit of tech opened up a whole new world of possibilities for a frustrated, injured writer If you had asked me a month or two ago if I had ever had a spatial immersive experience, or what the chances were that at the age of 60, I would become an early adopter of virtual reality goggles, I would have said it was about as likely as a tech giant from Silicon Valley being appointed to “disrupt” the US federal government.Let me explain the unlikely series of events that led me to the latest in technology. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago DeepSeek focuses on research over revenue in contrast to Silicon Valley

Chinese start-up to concentrate resources on building machines with humanlike cognitive capabilities

Politics

2 w. ago ‘Guess what? You don’t matter’: what Trump’s war on DEI means for every American who’s not a straight white man

The government’s move to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion policies is a naked attempt to appeal to prejudice – but it may well backfireAlmost a decade ago, I started a business called Rent-A-Minority, which enabled companies to hire a minority ethnic person whenever they needed an injection of diversity to boost their image. I had a variety of inclusivity-enriching hires available, including an “ethnically ambiguous” category and a selection of smiling Muslim women (guaranteed not to support Islamic State or your money back).Like every good startup, Rent-A-Minority posted testimonials from clients and influencers on its website. I made up all the blurbs, because that is the Silicon Valley way: fake it till you make it. One of those fake comments was from Donald Trump, who was still considered a long shot for the presidency in January 2016, when my business launched. “When I’m president, I’ll shut this site down,” Trump’s blurb read. Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago We are stuck. Declining. And spiraling. We need a breakthrough | Amana Fontanella

We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Will technology push us over the edge or help us exit our many crises?Today we live in an era defined by crisis. Indeed, we are facing multiple overlapping threats at once: from accelerating climate breakdown to the rise of authoritarianism across the world, we are in a situation that the historian Adam Tooze calls “polycrisis”. It is no wonder that hope is scarce, pessimism is high and despair is pervasive. As one meme that captures the grim, morbid mood of our age reads: “My retirement plan is civilisational collapse.”But not everyone shares this gloomy outlook. On the extreme other end of public sentiment sit Silicon Valley billionaires: they are some of the most optimistic people on earth. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic when you are sitting on enough money to sway national politics. And yet, the source of their optimism isn’t simply money. It is also a deep-seated faith in unfettered technological advances. Con...

Politics

3 w. ago ‘It’s so exciting to be in on this’: why Chelsea owners bought into the Hundred

Jonathan Goldstein, who with Todd Boehly spent £40m to buy half of Trent Rockets, say English cricket has been ‘significantly underexploited’ until nowAs a man who has negotiated with Roman Abramovich and Daniel Levy, Jonathan Goldstein is no novice when it comes to investing in sport, but even he professes to have been stunned and thrilled when participating in last month’s Hundred auction.The Chelsea director “maintained discipline” as a rival Silicon Valley consortium featuring the chief executives of Microsoft and Google paid £144m for 49% of London Spirit. He then returned to the England and Wales Cricket Board’s virtual auction room the following week to buy half of Trent Rockets for £40m, in partnership with Todd Boehly, the Chelsea co-owner and chair, and the private equity company Ares Management. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago ‘Musk? He’s horrendous’: Martha Lane Fox on diversity, tech bros and International Women’s Day

The investor and former Twitter board member believes rejecting DEI initiatives is simply denying US firms talentAs Elon Musk grinned in the Oval Office, one of Britain’s most influential tech investors looked on in horror. “He is absolutely horrendous. I have said it multiple times: I think it is horrifying what is happening,” says Martha Lane Fox.For the British peer and ex-Twitter board member, the sight of Musk holding forth from the bully pulpit of Donald Trump’s White House shows the Silicon Valley dream has gone sour. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

How a group of Silicon Valley math prodigies, AI researchers and internet burnouts descended into an alleged violent cultYears before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat.The programmer was known to friends, foes and followers as Ziz. She had come to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 as part of an influx of young people arriving to study the dangers that artificial intelligence could pose to humanity. Continue reading...

Events

4 w. ago Anthropic’s valuation triples to $61.5bn in bumper AI funding round

Start-up raises $3.5bn from Silicon Valley venture firms in race against OpenAI and DeepSeek

Economics

4 w. ago If the best defence against AI is more AI, this could be tech’s Oppenheimer moment

An unsettling new book advocates a closer relationship between Silicon Valley and the US government to harness artificial intelligence in the name of national securityOscar Wilde’s quip, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, needs updating: replace “art” with “AI”. The Amazon page for Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zapiska’s new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, also lists: a “workbook” containing “key takeaways” from the volume; a second volume on how the Karp/Zapiska tome “can help you navigate life”; and a third offering another “workbook” comprising a “Master Plan for Navigating Digital Age and the Future of Society”. It is conceivable that these parasitical works were written by humans, but I wouldn’t bet on it.Mr Karp, the lead author of the big book, is an interesting guy. He has a BA in philosophy from an American liberal arts college, a law degree from Stanford and a PhD in neoclassical social theory from G...

Politics